Ascertaining the Reality of Network Neutrality Violation in Backbone ISPs

On the Internet today, a growing number of QoS sensitive network applications exist, such as VoIP, imposing more stringent requirements on ISPs besides the basic reachability assurance. Thus, the demand on ISPs for Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with better guarantees is increasing. However, despite overprovisioning in core ISP networks, resource contention still exists leading to congestion and associated performance degradations. For example, residential broadband networks rate-limit or even block bandwidth intensive applications such as peer-to-peer le sharing thereby violating network neutrality. In addition, traffic associated with specific applications, such as Skype, could also be discriminated against for competitive business reasons.